Cylinder liners have been employed for many years in internal combustion engines. Rather than cylinder bores being defined directly by an engine block, an engine block may be equipped with a plurality of cylinder liners each defining a cylinder bore for receiving a piston. Cylinder liners are typically removable, such that upon engine servicing or rebuild the cylinder liners can be extracted from the engine block and replaced with new cylinder liners. Operating conditions in typical internal combustion engines can be quite harsh, subjecting cylinder liners to extremes of temperature, pressure, and relatively wide swings in those variables. For these reasons it is common for cylinder liners removed from an engine after service to be worn or deformed out of original specifications. In certain instances cylinder liners may be damaged such as by cracking, and standard practice has long been to scrap all cylinder liners rather than attempting repair and/or reuse.
For various reasons, in recent years a premium has been placed on reuse of parts and materials in many commercial areas, notably the field of engine repair and remanufacturing. The motivations behind reuse can be economic, technical, due to various administrative requirements, or combinations of these and other factors. In the case of certain components which by their nature are intended to be replaceable, cylinder liners being one example, the various cross-coupled factors affecting viability of reuse have not yet aligned and/or the technical know how to actually implement reuse practices has simply not existed. In the field of remanufacturing, parts to be reused typically must be prepared to a state as good as or better than new before they are considered ready for returning to service. Remanufacturing engineers and technicians often rely upon a print or other source of specifications for new parts as the standard to which remanufactured parts must be returned. Even where factors theoretically align to make remanufacturing and reuse of certain parts economically feasible, the challenges to satisfying original specifications can render remanufacturing and reuse impossible or impractical. Compounding these challenges is a general lack of understanding respecting failure modes and phenomena such as wear, stress and strain that are experienced by various components during service. One known engine repair strategy that relates to cylinder head joints is taught in commonly owned U.S. Pat. No. 5,575,251 to Bock, but does not appear to extend to repairing a cylinder liner itself.